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What really happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11 this year? Three months after the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed by a howling mob of Islamists in a country we helped liberate, and as a new round of congressional hearings begins, an independent panel has come forth with its report and the answer is . . . we still don’t really know much more than we did before.

The Accountability Review Board’s report did confirm, yet again — contrary to what the Obama administration told the nation for days after the attack — that there was no spontaneous protest against an obscure You Tube video outside the Benghazi compound that led to its sacking.

Nor was there adequate security, despite Ambassador Chris Stevens’ urgent requests. Instead, State, citing “budget constraints,” chose to rely on “grossly inadequate” local militias to protect the consulate (which is now widely believed to have been a secret CIA interrogation center and rendition prison).

“Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” concluded the commission, co-chaired by retired diplomat Thomas Pickering and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen.

The report absolved the US military, saying we lacked adequate forces in the region to be able to come to Stevens’ rescue in time. Pathetically, the nation that once commanded the Mediterranean Sea with its Seventh Fleet now can’t get airplanes from bases in Italy to Libya in a timely manner.

A few heads have rolled, including that of the State Department’s security chief, but the higher ups who were party to the fiasco — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice and President Obama, on whose desk the buck putatively stops — are unscathed by the fog of lies that has shrouded Benghazi ever since the outrage.

(Yes, Rice had to take herself out of the running to replace Clinton at State — but that apparently had less to with her Benghazi “misstatements” than with attacks from the left, perhaps abetted by a Washington smear campaign orchestrated on behalf of John Kerry, who’ll now get the job.)

In fact, Clinton — preserving her political viability for a possible 2016 White House run — is so loath to take the fall for the disaster on her watch that she’s suffered a miraculous concussion and “just can’t” testify before the congressional panels looking into the fiasco.

Sure, she’s “accepted responsibility” in a generic way, the same way Attorney General Janet Reno “accepted responsibility” for the fatally botched 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco.

Nowadays, “accepting responsibility” means never having to say you’re sorry, much less resign — or even show up in front of Congress.

So is this how Benghazi ends — with a few bureaucrats shuffled into retirement or re-assigned elsewhere in the vast Foggy Bottom sinkhole, there to collect their pensions and paychecks at taxpayer expense.

This bloodless report adds next to nothing to what we already knew — or suspected — about Benghazi. Nor does it honor the memories of those who died there defending a patch in the desert that was nevertheless sovereign American soil.